On Sunday’s episode of CNN’s State of the Union, Donald Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort took host Jake Tapper and CNN to task for not doing a better job covering the real news of the campaign and instead focusing on trivial matters meant to drive ratings.

Manafort hit Tapper in particular for his network’s refusal to cover the Clinton “Pay-for-Play” scandal, and for siding with Hillary Clinton’s economic plan over Mr. Trump’s. However, Tapper pointed out (rightly) that he at least had covered the Clinton scandal and had pointed out how damning this all looks for Clinton. Still, Manafort pressed on arguing that CNN (and Tapper) had chosen to spend far more time talking about Mr. Trump’s 2nd Amendment comments than they did his economic plan (which is vastly superior to Hillary Clinton’s “Continue Obama’s Policies” plan) or Mrs. Clinton’s obviously tainted time at the State Department.

You could have covered what he was saying, or you could try and take an aside and take the Clinton narrative and play it out, and you chose to do that instead. There’s plenty of news to cover this week that I haven’t seen covered. You had information coming out about pay for play out of e-mails of Hillary Clinton’s that weren’t turned over, by the way, to the Justice Department for her investigation. That’s a major news story. You had — you had the NATO base in Turkey under attack by terrorists. You had a number of things that were appropriate to this campaign, were part of what Mr. Trump has been talking about. You had economic numbers coming out this week showing that productivity is down, housing ownership is down, unemployment, you know, is at the — at over 102 million. These are all things that could have been covered this week. Instead you took an aside that the Clinton narrative told you was something Mr. Trump told you he didn’t mean and played it out for two days. That’s what we’re talking about…

Jake, we’ve been talking about these messages all week. You covered it one day, and you covered this aside about the Second Amendment for three days. Come on! There’s not a comparison here. You had a chance to have a serious discussion about the two economic programs that were presented this past week — this very week by the two candidates, there was no discussion. There was no comparison.

Onan is the Editor-in-Chief at Romulus Marketing. He's also the managing editor at Eaglerising.com, Constitution.com and the managing partner at iPatriot.com. Onan is a graduate of Liberty University (2003) and earned his M.Ed. at Western Governors University in 2012. Onan lives in Atlanta with his wife and their three wonderful children. You can find his writing all over the web.